What My Daughter Taught Me About Compassion

Sarah understood that changing the world meant starting with our relationship.

By

David Horowitz

Updated Dec. 25, 2009 9:00 p.m. ET

President Barack Obama has been in office nearly one year, making it two since my late daughter Sarah trudged through a freezing winter in Iowa to help him win the nomination. According to a Gallup poll conducted on the anniversary of the presidential vote, only 28% of Americans still believe that Mr. Obama will be "able to heal political divisions in the country." A year ago, 54% felt he would be able to do so.

When I read those figures I can't help thinking about Sarah. For the two of us reflected the country's political divisions in our own relationship—a case familiar to many American families. As a conservative and an active participant in political conflicts, I am acutely aware of how difficult it is, despite best intentions, to change the tone in the midst of debate, and how many otherwise thoughtful people can be swept up in its lower passions.

Despite our political differences—and the painful distances and predictable frustrations they created—Sarah and I ultimately came to the point where we were able to avoid the rancors of these public imbroglios. By the time she was overtaken by medical complications that derived from a birth defect, and which made efforts like her Iowa campaign extraordinarily difficult, we were quite close. Sarah and I were able to be respectful not only of the fact that we had such differences, but of the reasons why we had them. After her death in March 2008, I decided to write a memoir of her remarkable life, and to include the story of our estrangement and reunion in the hopes it might be helpful to others facing similar divisions.

My daughter was largely responsible for our reconciliation. She wanted to change the world—yet she knew this could only be accomplished one person at a time, and only by respecting the dignity of others.

Despite her physical disabilities, Sarah traveled on buses and on foot across San Francisco to feed the homeless. Even though she was a vegetarian herself, she learned to prepare meat dishes for them, because that was what they wanted. She stood vigil in bitter winters at San Quentin prison whenever there was an execution. But she did not think the criminals on behalf of whom she protested were innocent. Nor did she think they should be released. Sarah just felt that it was bad for the nation's soul to take a life.

Over the years, I came to realize that while some of my daughter's views were different from mine, the values they reflected and, most importantly, the estimates of human character on which they were based, were not so different that I could not recognize them. This recognition and the love I felt for her allowed me to open my heart and to learn.

A particular bone of contention between us had been over the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, which means "repair of the world," and is often wrongly conflated with the left's quest for "social justice." My life experience had led me to conclude that not only was changing the world an impossible dream, but the refusal to recognize it as such was the source of innumerable individual tragedies and of epic misery that human beings had inflicted on each other in my lifetime through the failed utopianisms of Nazism and communism.

For more than a decade, Sarah and I argued across this gap with much disappointment until I came to realize that I was missing a crucial element that connected her view and mine. This realization was crystallized in an exchange we had over a book I had written called "The End of Time." In that book, I observed that while the prophets of all religions taught us to love each other as we love ourselves and to think that "there but for the grace of God go I," this advice was ultimately imprudent.

Is it wise, I asked, "to put our trust in strangers, or to love our enemies as ourselves? Would we advise our children to do so?"

Then came a passage to which Sarah took great exception: "I cannot embrace this radical faith," I wrote. "I feel no kinship with those who can cut short a human life without remorse; or with terrorists who target the innocent; or with adults who torment small children for the sexual thrill. I suspect no decent soul does either."

Sarah took these words as an attack on the very rationale of her life, and responded at first with anger. But she relented and then wrote me this: "My objection is that you're confusing compassion with gullibility. I do visit prisoners and I think it matters to make that human connection. That doesn't mean I'd necessarily trust them with my purse. I wouldn't let the State execute them in my name either. I don't think kinship with people who've crossed the line blurs my own morality. In fact, it gives it more clarity. If you see someone in the fullness of their humanity, you see how they are acting out their own confusion and suffering.

"This does not justify hurtful or evil acts. It doesn't even always inspire forgiveness. But if you see someone this way, you respond more in sadness than in anger. And that is simply a more excellent state of being."

A more excellent state of being. My daughter not only understood the limits we face in trying to repair the world, but she had taught me that compassion like hers could be informed by a sense of these limits as well. "Even if you've never had this experience," she continued, "respect the experience of those who have. I'm not talking about an idea either. This is a full-bodied understanding of another person. This practice has in fact transformed all my relationships, including ours by the way."

Mr. Horowitz is the author, most recently, of "A Cracking of the Heart," a memoir about his daughter just published by Regnery.

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